Comments on: Woo on WBUR http://www.edscotw.com/2008/05/10/woo-on-wbur/ edscotw.com Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:01:39 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: lil_sis http://www.edscotw.com/2008/05/10/woo-on-wbur/comment-page-1/#comment-209 lil_sis Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:03:51 +0000 http://www.edscotw.com/2008/05/10/woo-on-wbur/#comment-209 Having been the chairman of The Tech during a summer when we were more than $30k in the hole (TT runs on its own ads revenue; we were hit hard by both the early Dubya term 1 recession and by embezzling business staff), I reluctantly decided to run a Scientology insert. It was a summer issue, low readership, blah blah blah, and we made them print "special advertising insert to The Tech" on the top, but we still got complaints. I felt like a miserable sell-out fraud. I might as well have been jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. But I stand by my decision. First of all, we really, really needed that $15k to stay solvent. I don't think NPR exactly runs on an excess of funding, either. Second of all, you can't censor people just because you disagree with them (this comes up in the Op-Ed section too). Whether or not you respect homeopathy, it's at least valuable to understand what drives people to seek alternatives to mainstream medicine. What we really need to do is to educate people to interpret information, especially adverts, with a healthy dose of skepticism and with greater acceptance of complicated, ambiguous answers. I mean, even when people read quality science articles in legit publications, the takeaway message is often that this one JAMA paper is The Final Word on what causes cancer and if you just avoid A and B you can do whatever you like and never get sick. Having been the chairman of The Tech during a summer when we were more than $30k in the hole (TT runs on its own ads revenue; we were hit hard by both the early Dubya term 1 recession and by embezzling business staff), I reluctantly decided to run a Scientology insert. It was a summer issue, low readership, blah blah blah, and we made them print “special advertising insert to The Tech” on the top, but we still got complaints. I felt like a miserable sell-out fraud. I might as well have been jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.

But I stand by my decision.

First of all, we really, really needed that $15k to stay solvent. I don’t think NPR exactly runs on an excess of funding, either.

Second of all, you can’t censor people just because you disagree with them (this comes up in the Op-Ed section too). Whether or not you respect homeopathy, it’s at least valuable to understand what drives people to seek alternatives to mainstream medicine.

What we really need to do is to educate people to interpret information, especially adverts, with a healthy dose of skepticism and with greater acceptance of complicated, ambiguous answers. I mean, even when people read quality science articles in legit publications, the takeaway message is often that this one JAMA paper is The Final Word on what causes cancer and if you just avoid A and B you can do whatever you like and never get sick.

]]> By: Googling ‘BUR « The ConverStation http://www.edscotw.com/2008/05/10/woo-on-wbur/comment-page-1/#comment-165 Googling ‘BUR « The ConverStation Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:07:07 +0000 http://www.edscotw.com/2008/05/10/woo-on-wbur/#comment-165 [...] we do receive our fair share of criticism. To wit: Ed of Ed’s corner of the web: I’m driving up Route 2 towards Concord, enjoying “Only a Game.” The usual WBUR [...] [...] we do receive our fair share of criticism. To wit: Ed of Ed’s corner of the web: I’m driving up Route 2 towards Concord, enjoying “Only a Game.” The usual WBUR [...]

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